Prospecting for new bacterial metabolites : a glossary of approaches for inducing, activating and upregulating the biosynthesis of bacterial cryptic or silent natural products
Abstract
Over the centuries, microbial secondary metabolites have played a central role in the treatment of human diseases and have revolutionised the pharmaceutical industry. With the increasing number of sequenced microbial genomes revealing a plethora of novel biosynthetic genes, natural product drug discovery is entering an exciting second golden age. Here, we provide a concise overview as an introductory guide to the main methods employed to unlock or up-regulate these so called ‘cryptic’, ‘silent’ and ‘orphan’ gene clusters, and increase the production of the encoded natural product. With a predominant focus on bacterial natural products we will discuss the importance of the bioinformatics approach for genome mining, the use of first different and simple culturing techniques and then the application of genetic engineering to unlock the microbial treasure trove.
Citation
Zarins-Tutt , J S , Triscari Barberi , T , Gao , H , Mearns-Spragg , A , Zhang , L , Newman , D & Goss , R J M 2015 , ' Prospecting for new bacterial metabolites : a glossary of approaches for inducing, activating and upregulating the biosynthesis of bacterial cryptic or silent natural products ' , Natural Product Reports , vol. Advance article . https://doi.org/10.1039/C5NP00111K
Publication
Natural Product Reports
Status
Peer reviewed
ISSN
0265-0568Type
Journal article
Rights
Copyright 2015 the Authors. This work is made available online in accordance with the publisher’s policies. This is the author created, accepted version manuscript following peer review and may differ slightly from the final published version. The final published version of this work is available at https://dx.doi.org/10.1039/C5NP00111K
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